Should I use isobooter.tar.gz or isobooter_other-1.0.tar.gz, for installing distros like Tiny Core Linux and Slitaz?

You are running a Puppy, so you will use isobooter.tar.gz. An Ubuntu user who wanted to make bootable flash drives would use isobooter_other-1.0.tar.gz.

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I am asuming that ISObooter runs only in Linux. That is, it cannot make bootable pendrives from WindowsXP (the op sys on my hard drive). Is that right?

Correct. There are lots of Windows tools for doing this. One of them is discussed here.

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Anecdotally, I tried to use the Puppy Universal Installer that came with Puppeee 4.4, and which was meant only to install Puppy, to put Grub onto a flash drive on which I had already placed the files from an iso of TinyCorePlus 4.7.4. The application allows you to choose where it will install Grub, and I guessed correctly that it was sdc1 (I am running Puppeee from sdb). Grub did get put onto the flash drive, but, probably because I do not know how to edit the files properly, the flash drive still was not bootable. Maybe I get a star for a good try, though <grin>.

The point of ISObooter is that you don't have to unpack the ISO file and guess how to install it.

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One last thought for now: Because I had so much trouble trying to install Slitaz on a pendrive (their own tazusb.exe does not work!), I went into the Slitaz forum and asked for help. They told me that Slitaz could not be installed onto a FAT file system, so none of the installers that run in Windows would work. Strangely enough, though, most of those installers list Slitaz as a supported distro. Any comment on this?

There is a difference between booting a distro's Live CD and actually doing a hard drive install. But I just used ISObooter to boot Slitaz off a FAT32 flash drive. It took about 30 seconds to set up.

Here's a quickee I've been meaning to ask someone for a long time:
Isn't there a difference between installing an iso on a pendrive and installing the extracted files? If it's the iso, how can it have persistence (in Puppeee, the save file)?

Ubuntu, I believe, creates a separate partition for a casper file for persistence. But how would an iso be able to save changes?

As I understand it, the iso is extracted to RAM. So how do the changes get put back into the iso at the end of a session? It can't be done, can it, without creating a new iso?

I've been lurking this thread with interest since--using an eee 900--I just moved from an early alpha puppeee (w/ a very-stripped kernel) to Puppy 1.0 Celeron.

1.0 is a great puppeee and doesn't always get its deserved kudos. For one thing, its pwireless2 picks up and connects the 900 the fastest of any puppy I've tried on the eee.

I also think that Chrome serves the 900 very well. jemimah's Chrome is 5, but Chrome 7 will install on top of it nicely:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=61075

Chrome 7 is probably the highest you can go on a 4.31 set-up. For me at least, I find this to be the fastest browsing--but for reasons I haven't determined, you can't log-in to Chrome to sync bookmarks, etc. I can live w/ that, I guess, though I'd like to know why.

Mike7, I highly recommend getting an internal ssd for your machine. To be doing all you're doing, and trying to do it on usb only (especially when playing w/ other linux's) could compound problems w/ the beginner's installations.

Also, w/ an ssd, your puppy--even though frugally installed--will fly much faster, since you can store the OS sfs, save file, and other sfs's on the ssd. There's a neat, one-line trick in the syslinux.cfg file to get this to work.

And, lastly, Lubuntu 12.10 has been--at least for me--the definitive Linux for the eee. Everything works OOB, 3-second shutdown, and if it's installed on an ssd, it boots even faster than puppeee. Not to mention that it's au currant, with automatic updates almost daily.

I have run Lubuntu off a USB, a big pain and very slow.

So I have Lubuntu 12.10/XP SP3 on the ssd and Puppy 1.0 booting off a class 10 sd card, but accessing its main files on the ssd. Obviously, XP is the weak link here. My heart is always with puppy, and I run one on all my netbooks, but Lubuntu and the eee are a great pair.

The forum here, as we all know, is the best--far, far better than the Ubuntu forum, which has over 3 million posts, I believe. Posting there is like jumping off the earth.

You seem to have great enthusiasm for this venture--my suggestion is get an ssd and not hamstring yourself w/ missing hardware. Its purchase will make life very much fun

Isn't there a difference between installing an iso on a pendrive and installing the extracted files? If it's the iso, how can it have persistence (in Puppeee, the save file)?

Not sure what you are asking. All I can say is how I test MacPup for runtt21.

I download what ever test iso he emails me. I use unetbootin for linux to install the test iso
(by the way, I md5sum check all downloaded files to save headaches in testing later)

I boot the flash drive test iso with the syslinux bootloader provided with unetbootin.
Then after getting to the desktop. I install grub4dos to mbr on the pendrive to get rid of
syslinux bootloader. Why you may ask?

Because grub4dos gives more boot options than syslinux does. After grub4dos is installed. I shutdown and make a 512MB save file ext2 and name it test1(with the date).

Reboot and then set up wireless (which I tested earlier before making save file) and do whatever changes I wish to do to personalize and install certain applications I personally use as part of the test.

That install is a quad booter, (Macpup,Vector,Semplice,AntiX) in my Desktop computer, not pendrive but is a frugal install next to full installs of other linux distros with grub2 and legacy grub, motorcycle shop that I let other bikers play with.

I can support Yakfisk in his choice for Lubuntu 12.10. It really is a good choice for netbooks.

I have a 1001ha eeePC with the standard 1 gig memory, and stille it's original harddisk that has XP sp3 and Lubuntu 12.10 and run puppy from sd card in a grub4dos triboot. 80%of the time I run puppy. Only when apps are missing I fall back to Lubuntu or XP.

But, after running puppeeee for long, I have settled on Slacko 5.3.3. Faster, more stable, and has almost all functions covered that puppeeee has. I did not even bother to replace Seamonkey with Opera (my favorite browser becuase it has turbo that avoids the piratebay blockades we have in Holland).

Good Luck with your investigation. Zorin lite may be an option since it is a Lubuntu derivate.

Thank you for the suggestions. I will seriously consider putting an SSD in my EeePC as soon as the HDD breaks down, which I fear is not far off.

I agree that Pwireless2 is a great program. The interface, with all its data tabs, is brilliant.

Puppeee 4.4 takes a while to boot. For one thing, it has to put everything in RAM. For another, it has to restore the save file. Considering all that, it's pretty fast. A lot faster than XP (but that's not saying much <grin>.

As a firefox adept, I'm having some trouble getting used to Chrome. I really don't like the way it handles bookmarks. The Firefox bookmark organizer is far clearer, simpler, and faster. And since I have around five hundred bookmarks at this point, that makes a lot of difference.

I am planning to try one of the Ubuntu varieties (maybe Lubuntu; maybe Fuduntu, which was designed for the Eee) as soon as I find a USB installer that works. I will try ISObooter later today.

This is a great forum, like you say. Great people. They'd have to be because Puppy Linux, and perhaps especially Puppeee, are such marvellous systems. The programs packed into the 131Mb of Puppeee 4.4 are amazing. Abiword, for example. And the integrated file managers and word processors. Plus the simple, clear, minimalist GUI and desktop, which beat all the fancy stuff by a mile.

Anyway, thanks again for your post. Since you're a Puppeee user, why not try out Puppeee 4.4 and see how it compares to 1.0. I'd be interested to know your findings.

At the risk of becoming a pest, I'm going to ask you the same question I asked Rok. I really want to undertstand this, and since I'll be using ISObooter it's important to me.

Isn't there a difference between installing an iso on a pendrive and installing the extracted files? If it's an iso, how can it have persistence (in Puppeee, the save file)? Ubuntu, I believe, creates a separate partition for a casper file for persistence. But how would an iso be able to save changes?

As I understand it, the iso is extracted to RAM. So how do the changes get put back into the iso at the end of a session? It can't be done, can it, without creating a new iso?

I'm just a tinkerer, but have been a Puppy fan for about six years: ever since a I got tired of waiting for a Thinkpad 600e (no longer existent) to boot. Somehow over the years I've acquired 6 computers of various makes, including an Asus 701SD, and a little bit of knowledge about Puppies. I test almost every new Puppy when it is published, and follow its developments.
I strongly recommend that in your exploration of Puppies you try out 'lina-lite, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=82119&sid=b80e28a52ebba726e1117c571b74e041 and Grub4Dos. 'lina-lite is the conceptual descendent of Puppee. Jemimah, after creating Puppee and Fluppee –a generic of Puppee, not just for Asus computers-- went on to create Saluki, including in it many innovations. Jemimah is a computer professional. Unfortunately, within a period of six months she experienced two employment reverses and has “gone walkabout” apparently avoiding anything which has to do with computers. Fortunately for us, Geoffrey and Elroy chose not to allow her efforts to go to waste, but rather than continue them under the name “Saluki,” with respect for jemimah, published the derivative, “Carolina.” Elroy, developed a “stripped down” version known as “lina-lite.”
One of the innovations Jemimah developed was separating the day-to-day, user-oriented applications from those required just for the operating system to function. Having decompressed puppee's zip –and perhaps by now an ISO [if not, in any Puppy all you have to do is Right-click it to mount it, right-click again to unmount] you probably know by now that (other than files used by to boot) it contains 3 files, sometimes 4: initrd (usually with the suffix gz or xz) vmlinuz, and one identifying the puppy variant, such as puppee_xxx.sfs. The 4th file which starts with zdrv contains hardware drivers that were separated out. Jemimah separated out from the xxx.sfs file the puplet's "user-applications" --i.e., webbrowsers, wordprocessors, graphics editors and multimedia programs-- into a file beginning with adrv. Saluki (and Carolina and 'lina-lite) will boot to a desktop even if the “adrive” isn't present, and enable you to get on line and download applications. Carolina is packaged with the full compliment of user applications one comes to expect in a Puppy, albeit they're all in the adrive. I'm not certain what, if any, other applications Elroy transferred between the xxx.sfs and the adrive, but it's default adrive only includes, I think, two small applications: geany and one other. Hand-in-hand with that innovation, was jemimah's creation of a “builder” app including in the “base.” What the builder app does, once you're on line, is enable you to download from the Pup's repository, the most current versions of the extensive apps found there, http://smokey01.com/carolina/pet_packages-carolina/ WITH DEPENDENCY CHECKING BUILT IN, and build your own custom adrive. [Before an adrive is built, you can add pets and SFSes not from Saluki/Carolina, however, without dependency checking]. You can, of course, as with any other Pup, install pets into your SaveFile (persistence), load SFSes on the fly, and make use of Program Folders (folders containing entire applications outside your system, merely linked to it: about which, more later). I think by now all SFSes built for Saluki can be found in Carolina's repo, but if not they will run and can be found here: http://smokey01.com/saluki/sfs/. Chrome 12 is among those SFSes, although personally I don't use Chrome. Opera is almost as fast, can be run as a Program Folder, and doesn't report everything I do to Google. And NoScript works without a hitch.
One of the applications built into 'lina-lite is Grub4dos –oddly misnamed as it's supposed to be understood to mean “not merely for dos.” When run, what it does is scan either your entire computer or just the partition on which you've chosen to install it, such as on a USB-Key drive. Like Grub, it uses menu.lst to create a menu of operating systems you may want to boot. But unlike Grub it automatically generates a menu.lst with the proper boot arguments for Windows (at least XP), every Puppy* and almost every Linux distribution. I've placed a * by Puppy because I know it finds every one which uses initrd.gz, believe it also finds those with the xz ending, but think it misses those without any ending. From experience, I can tell you that it created proper listings for pclinuxos, ubuntu, mint and pinguy, but not for zorin. Best yet, if you going to multi-boot, to add more Puppies, you don't have to re-run Grub4dos writing to your boot record. You can open menu.lst in geany, or your favorite text editor, copy a previous Puppy listing, paste it and change the pasted listing to properly reflect the name of the new Puppy's folder, and the drive and partition on which the folder is located.
Perhaps an example will help answer a number of your questions. My niece will shortly have a birthday. As she expressed concerns about using her old computer, I decided to send her a copy of Puppy, albeit retro-precise on a USB-Key. So I plugged the key in, opened gParted and reformatted it (the second time) to Fat32, and set its flag to “boot.” Closed gparted and created a folder “Tracey” on the Key; Right-clicked the retro-precise ISO, and dragged its three essential files to the Tracey folder. Right-clicked the retro-precise ISO to unmount it. Ran Grub4dos and selected the USB-Key for its installation, and “search only this partition.” The following is the listing it produced, after I edited the title line which was something like “Precise Puppy” to “My Pup”:

I did all the above on my desktop, then plug it into my Laptop, a Thinkpad T42. It not only booted into Puppy, but also booted into the Windows installation on my T42.
That part of the listing appearing in the Title is for your information. It is not used by the computer during bootup. Apparently, neither is the line which reads “uuid 4ECA-9349.” To add another Puppy copy the rest of the listing, leaving that line out, and making the above mentioned changes including the title which will appear on screen.
I mentioned reformating a second time because originally I had used gParted to create two partitions on the USB-Key: one formatted as Ext4, the other Fat32. The idea I had was to set it up with data folders on the Fat32 partition she could save to in while in Puppy, that she could access when running XP, yet still have the advantages of running Puppy from a Linux partition. There's a application called “startmount” I thought could work, but I later learned it would either automatically mount all Fat32 partitions or none. Not being able to select only the one on the USB-Key, I reformatted as one Fat32 partition. [The advantage of Linux partitions over “Windows” formats is that symlinks will work between Linux partitions, but not between a Linux and a “Windows” partition].
As Slitaz requires a Linux partition, you could partition a USB-Key to provide it with one. Grub4Dos might even create a proper menu.lst(ing). And, of course, since all Puppy needs is a folder, you might not even need to partition. Just create a folder for Puppy on the Linux partition. Of course, unless you install a program enabling XP to read Linux partitions, it won't be able to read the files you write.
I should also mention that all my computers, including the 4 which still have XP installs, use Grub4dos.
I think the only reason I still have XP on my computers is to run tax preparation software. Having been unused for long periods of time, on the rare occasions I do boot into XP I have to waste time installing new antivirus software before I can do anything else. But since I had many Gbs of storage not being used, I finally, with great trepidation, decided to resize my ntfs partitions for use by various Puppies, applications used by Puppies, and data generated while running Puppies. Also for trying out other Linux distros. Gparted handled resizing flawlessly. The most important thing to remember is that before resizing an ntfs or Fat(32) partition is to defrag it so that your the various parts of your files aren't scattered all over the place. Just start defragging one night before you go to sleep. It may take a while. The first time you boot Windows after resizing it, it will complain because of the reduction but after a few minutes it will have adjusted to its new, limited, confines.
Multibooting various Pups, you'll want to consider the advantages of using SFSes and Program Folders, rather than pets which require the use of space by each pet into which an application is installed. See http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84457. Program Folders are self-contained and can be run from any Puppy without fear of overwriting libs used by other applications. Sfses can be loaded by any “compatible” Puppy. Regarding compatibility, see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=83984&sid=9b4ad09720cfad51e180bce31b500324. Opera, firefox, FreeOffice and LibreOffice can be run as Program Folders. See the following thread. http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=507532#507532. Frankly, I've had Libreoffice4 as a Program Folder crash on me –don't know if the problem is just with that version-- so reverted to using the SFS. But see my strong recommendation in the second post of that thread to acquire FreeOffice, which was designed to be “portable.” As a Portable it only take up 99Mb of space, and reads and writes the latest Microsoft formats used by Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Unlike Libreoffice, however, it does not include a database manager, nor applications for generating formulas, creating drawings etc.
Although Carolina's repo has many applications, you may find others that may work. Look, in particular for “no-arch” or “common” listings in Puppy Package Manager. [And, if possible, select a repo other than ibiblio –its the slowest. I generally use nluug.nl]. But if your going to install a pet not made for your version of Puppy first backup your SaveFile to a Protected Folder. When Puppy boots it will look at the root of every partition and into every folder at the root level. But it won't look into folders within folders. There's an app called “hot backup” which might work to create an error free copy of a SaveFile while it's in use. But I do it manually: Boot into a different Puppy and just copy the SaveFile from the Puppy I'm not in into a second level folder, usually within the Puppy folder whose SaveFile I want to protect.

Carolina uses xfce 4.10 as its window manager. I know that can handle key-bindings, but don't know if it was implemented. You could ask on the Carolina Thread, or email Geoffrey or Elroy. Sorry, I'm currently not running Carolina so I can't check. May 'lna-lite was easily customizable to use two panels/taskbars: one at the bottom and the other (which only appears when moused-over) at the left edge of my screen. Between the two I have 9 launchers to my most commonly used applications.

If anybody is using Puppy 1.0, just a note to say that Grumpywolf's Chrome 10.0.612.1 dev will install over Chrome 5.

Even snappier, though still without successful log-in to sync bookmarks, etc.

With the advent of a really good browser, Puppy 1.0 is becoming my go-to, moving past Lubuntu 12.10.

I did install Zorin 6.2 Lite on a ssd partition and though intriguing, it didn't boot or shut-down as fast as Lubuntu. Too, it's based on Lubuntu 12.04, which only has 8 mos of updates remaining. 12.10 has 14.

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